The Arrest and Trial of Professor Azaan M

Professor Azaan Mirza had finished editing an article titled 'Constitution as Memory'. He was reaching for a volume of Faiz when they knocked. Three men. No warrant. No basis. Only a document marked 'Urgent: Internal Review.' His wife asked if it was a mistake.

The tallest man replied, “No, ma’am. This one teaches too well.”

Mirza was a professor of political history at the Republic Institute of Civic Thought, known for his lectures on partition, protest, and the long shadow of constitutional betrayal. He had degrees from foreign universities, but it was his clarity in public that made him suspect. He quoted Ambedkar, wrote op-eds on majoritarianism, and once described nationalism as “the art of forgetting inconvenient facts.”

His arrest was quiet. No headlines. No outrage. Just a line in the state gazette: “Preventive Detention under the Homeland Stability Protocol (HSP), Section 13B: Pre-Emptive Containment of Ideological Provocation.”

I found his file weeks later, misfiled in an archive box labelled “Civic Heritage Cases”. I was a law intern, tasked with cataloguing dormant litigation. Mirza’s wasn’t dormant. It was buried.

The file listed no formal charges — just risk assessments:

• Spoke at student events with anti-government themes
• Consistently invokes “constitutional decay” in public writing
• Displays continued reverence for pre-majoritarian thinkers.

There were court transcripts too. At one bail hearing, the judge had asked Mirza’s lawyer, “Are academics above national interest now?” Another justice – Dhrupad Karun – warned from the bench: “The Court shall not be mocked in the name of scholarship. If professors wish to act like provocateurs, they will be treated as such.”

That wasn’t a ruling. It was a warning shot.

Mirza’s university never issued a statement. A few students pasted his quotes on the notice board; they were torn down before noon. His name was quietly removed from the semester’s reading list.

Meanwhile, national TV called him “soft-seditionist”. An anchor displayed his handwriting on air and asked: “Is this the pen that poisons young minds?”

The surveillance file was clinical. His phone had been tapped for nine months. His class recordings were reviewed. He had used the phrase “structural forgetting” six times in one semester. His WhatsApp chats with colleagues abroad were flagged as “potentially adversarial information flows”. One memo called him “an emotionally persuasive threat to doctrinal stability.”

There was also a sealed court order: no reporting, no public mention of the case, and a bar on public protests or academic references to his name. The reasoning was simple: “National morale must not be undermined by elite dissent.”

I remembered him clearly. At a guest lecture the year before, he had said: “Laws without justice are rituals. And rituals, when emptied of meaning, are easy to weaponise.” He hadn’t raised his voice. He never did. I printed three pages from the file. I encrypted and sent them to a friend who ran a small academic newsletter. They published a veiled version – no names, no locations. Still, it reached people.

Soon, Mirza’s words began to reappear: quoted in footnotes, murmured at teach-ins, turned into protest posters that lasted only hours before being torn down.

A new court order followed: “The echo of subversion is no less dangerous than its origin.” Then came the next hearing. Mirza’s counsel argued that no evidence had been produced, no charge framed. Justice Karun interrupted: “Perhaps the problem is that we’ve allowed too many freedoms to those who hide behind degrees.”

Mirza didn’t speak. He stood in silence, wearing the same grey kurta from his last lecture.

The hearing lasted seven minutes. Bail was denied.

No one knows where he is now. Some say he’s still in detention. Others say he’s out – on the condition that he neither teaches nor writes. His name no longer appears on the university website. His published articles link to “Access Denied”.

But the students remember. They share fragments of his lectures in private study groups. One zine republishes his essays anonymously, under the heading: “Lessons They Tried to Delete.”

In the Republic, they say teaching is a noble profession. But Professor Azaan Mirza was not arrested for what he taught.

He was arrested for what he made others remember.

Jaideep Singh Lalli is an Advocate and PhD (Law) scholar at Trinity College, University of Cambridge.

This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.

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